


tap in

by sunsmasher



Series: HSWC Fills [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gore, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 19:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux dies during the final battle. Aradia thinks this is damn stupid, and reacts accordingly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tap in

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt:
> 
> _out of the ash i arise with my red hair and i eat men like air_ \-- "lady lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
> 
> I didn't do it justice.

Sollux taps out with no small fuss. There's a boom of screaming red and blue, something like a psionic Molotov catching light, dissolving six mammoth chessmen, four of the felt, and Jack's right wing down to the nub and bone. It leaves quite the smoking crater around his bony little body. Sollux was a monstrous shit in life, so really no one should have expected anything less than shock and blustering awe in his death.  
  
Aradia, when she taps in, is massive like galaxies and entirely still. Her mouth is wide in a scream and her wings flare like pennants, time-stuff pouring off her fingers and toes, but there's no sound. Not a hair stirs, not a muscle twitches. She's a red-rimmed statue appeared over the battlefield, and from her centerpoint, cessation explodes. Every body stills, every battle freezes, and the only two combatants with the temporal power and wherewithal to look to the girl with her finger on the cosmic pause button find themselves as rigid as the rest. Aradia died nothing like a hero and certainly not a villain, and when she comes screaming back to life with Jack's sword still rooted in her gut, back again from a place,  _the_  place, the one goddamn place where she's ever felt  _close_  to home, she comes back mad as hell and spitting power.   
  
Sollux is dead and that is not  _acceptable_.   
  
He can die, sure, he can be dead, even, but he can't ever stop  _living_  (and she can't ever stop dying, aren't they a pair, aren't they a match), and she can feel the dregs of his very last life crackling away in arcs and redblue flashes. This will not continue.   
  
She raises a hand, time flaring at her joints, and makes a fist. Time, already slowed to an imperceptible crawl, stops. The battlefield is big and Aradia, for all her anger (and there's never been much else to her, some have found) is small. She can't hold it frozen forever.  
  
Dave, with effort, can track her flight over the tableau. Lord English, who is nothing but mean, stubborn effort, can even turn his head to see her touch down. There's a rather wretched expression on her face as she nudges one spindly, skeleton, yellow-splattered shin with her toe, but English won't see that.  
  
"I refuse," she says to her frozen audience, those she can see above the lip of the crater. "I refuse! I have given myself over so many times, and let so much be taken from me, but that does not get to happen again. He is not yours to have, not on any terms but those I dictate."   
  
Nepeta is caught mid-leap, eyes still fixed on Jack's hunched form, Roxy reared back to break his skull against her fist. Jake clings to Lord English's slow-slow-slowly moving back, one gun pressed under the monster's jaw. Rose is high overhead, glowing like a star. They can't see Aradia as she presses her hair back against her horns, looking down into the hollow, bloodied face of an utterly stupid boy with alternating delusions of grandeur and inconsequence, who killed her once (though he didn't mean to), and insulted her a whole hell of a lot (he meant to do that, but she forgives him) and would probably spend eternity with her if she asked.   
  
Some day she's going to ask him, she very much intends to ask him, and everything else can go get fucked.   
  
Right thumb goes between his lips, index finger in the left socket and pinky in the right. Left hand is splayed across his chest, one finger dipping into the hollow of his throat, and she plants her feet to the sides of his knees. Bent over like this, crouching over his still-warm corpse, her wings fall like curtains about their heads. His snaggle-teeth catch against her thumb.  
  
"Sollux," she says, everything narrowed down to the face of the troll who's got more of her love than he's any right to and three of her fingers all up in his grill, "It is time for you to get your fat butt  _up_."  
  
Time crashes open and Sollux wakes sparking, already firing at the rookman lunging over her shoulder, life and violent light bursting from his eyes (and curses from his haggard lips) and she gets but a single, laughing kiss in before he's screaming for Lord English to try that shitscum trick with the fancy pistol again, see how well it fucking works when Sollux's foot is so far up his cosmic freakshow ass he'll be puking toenails for the rest of his fucking  _life_ —which, mind you—  
  
Aradia will make him thank her later. She's got words for Jack, and Sollux won't be taken from her again. She kicks off the glassy dirt with a grin and runs for the fight.


End file.
